Wook-kyung Choi: Alice’s Cat

Wook-kyung Choi: Alice’s Cat is a retrospective exhibition of the representative Korean abstract artist Wook-kyung Choi (1940~1985) that sheds new light on her artistic vision in toto and presents a comprehensive review of a wide range of her work and that of her career as an artist, educator, and poet. This exhibition aims to revisit and reinterpret Choi’s oeuvre by focusing on the multilayered linkages between her art and her engagement with literature through poetry, as well as and her interest in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865).

Born in Seoul in 1940, Wook-kyung Choi went to Seoul Arts High School and studied in the Department of Painting at Seoul National University. After graduating, Choi went to America in 1963, and worked as a painter and an art educator. In 1965, she authored Small Stones, a collection of her poems in English, displaying for the first time her interest in literature. She went back and forth between Korea and America in the 1970s while creating artworks and giving lectures. In 1972, she published forty-five poems in Korean in the volume Like Unfamiliar Faces, which included “Alice’s Cat.” Starting in 1979, Choi served as a professor at Yeungnam University and Duksung Women’s University and devoted herself to producing paintings on the themes of Korean mountains and islands. She passed away in 1985.

Although Choi was active as an artist, educator, and poet both in Korea and the United States, she was most widely recognized as an “American-style painter who embraced the influence of Abstract Expressionist art” or a “woman artist who died tragically young.” By illuminating Choi’s works from multiple perspectives through their relations with the contemporary art and literature of the period, Wook-kyung Choi, Alice’s Cat will offer an opportunity to re-explore the positioning of Choi’s art in the Korean art scene. Moreover, it will invite viewers to understand the contemporaneity of Choi’s active life and creations as she ceaselessly explored new worlds in Korea and the U.S., similar to Alice as she embarked on an adventure into Wonderland out of pure curiosity.

Alice’s Cat

Thousands of doors

To heaven are

Wide

Open

The sun

Shines radiant white

The pouring

Radiance of the sun

Blinds me.

From Wook-kyung Choi, Like Unfamiliar Faces, 1972.